January 16, 2013,
Opening: Wednesday, January 16, 5 to 7pm.
Exhibition runs January 16 to February 2, 2013
Featuring works by:
Matilda Aslizadeh, Scott Billings, Karilynn Ming Ho, Sophia Isajiw, Sasha Krieger, Nick Lakowski, Evan Lee, Athena Papadopoulos, Holly Parmley, Roula Partheniou, and Nick Smolinski.
Curated by Christine D’Onofrio.
When the rational meaning and natural order of things rub up against our sense of understanding, laughter’s innocent self-ignorance is perhaps a naïve, unconscious acquiescence responding to the shortcomings of knowledge. It is a laughter of despair at the mind’s failure to offer a satisfactory explanation of the world. Humour usually takes a subversive stance towards all given knowledge. Jokes are always a fantasy. Yet, they carry a cognitive reckoning that often yields more profound facts. That fleeting moment when the laughter of forgetting your self grasps the underlying cognitive truth, that moment of pure delight, is one of awareness of a revealed error. It secures us with a sense of superior knowledge, the superiority we feel over instinct, and yet belies the inferiority we have in understanding it. In this lies the idiot of nature – the human spirit is at once superior to material life, and yet the mind remains inferior to the pure realm of absolute truth. As an outlet for repressed, or socially-unacceptable norms, it is but a whisper to the larger, possibly even more exploitative, agenda of the virtues and vices of humour. Suspending judgment is the morality that compensates for the suspicious or doubtful. The artists do not create laughter, but rather, humour – in a dance between subjectivities. They bring us closer to reality by what is revealed through imagined ideals faced pragmatically, the ‘serious’ approached ‘playfully.’
Hours: Wednesday-Saturday 12-4pm
AHVA Library Gallery,
University of British Columbia
Koerner Library, Room 112
1958 Main Mall
604-822-4563
Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory
Exhibition Images:
